Paperless pre-start inspections are revolutionising the way that organisations and businesses manage the checks they undertake before engaging any piece of equipment or asset. Pre-start inspections can mean a wide variety of things; to a rental company it might be the checks you make before letting a customer drive away in the rental car; in a mine it might be the audit you undertake before engaging the hoist or excavation machinery.
Whatever your operational industry or field, in some way it is highly likely you need a form of pre-start inspection. When you have other business inspections, audit, or quality assurance needs – why spend time and energy having pre-start inspections separate from your other checks? Paperless pre-start inspections are fast becoming the go-to way to undertake any form of pre-engagement check for any organisation or business in any field.
The case for paperless pre-start inspections becomes clearer and more evident when you consider the wealth of technology available to inspectors today. By using a smartphone or tablet, similar to the one we use in our personal lives; inspectors can undertake simple and quick business checks. This could be a safety inspection of an equipment piece; a routine audit or compliance with an industry standard for heating, ventilation and cooling systems; or, a pre-start inspection. Paperless pre-start inspections make use of all the features of the smartphone or tablet device such as the camera, speech-to-text services, and touchscreen. Taking pictures, scanning barcodes/RFID, using voice to record observations, or using the touchscreen to annotate images gives the inspector more tools than a regular paper checklist. For pre-start inspections in rental, it can for example be particularly important to monitor and track the wear and condition of the asset before it is given to a customer. Only by doing this accurately can you comply with rental regulations as well as having no-questions evidence of the condition of the asset. Likewise, for inspections of large machinery with expensive parts to fix or lengthy downtime if issues occur; it may be necessary to make annotations to images to highlight areas of concern for other teams to look at. Small improvements to the inspection process in any pre-start check can mean big things further down the line.
